Laura Mulvey — The Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey, born August 15, 1941, is a feminist film critic. Oxford-educated, Mulvey is a highly praised and credible critic known for her theories in film and most popular for her early essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.

The term “male gaze” was first coined in 1975 by Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure”. Throughout the work, Mulvey explores the phenomenon of the male gaze, a perspective that serves to segment the female body into pieces that dehumanize the woman and subjects all viewers to a presumed heterosexual male viewpoint. At its heart, it is about portraying the woman as an object to be viewed and, by extension, the man as a subject doing the viewing and acting.

Marilyn Monroe in “The River of No Return”

One of Mulvey’s examples is the first appearance of actress Marilyn Monroe in the 1954 film, The River of No Return. During the scene, Monroe’s character is subject to the male gaze in a way that treats her like an ornamental object. Through a sexualized outfit and the lounging position she assumes, she becomes an object to be viewed, both by the audience of the film and the predominantly male audience within the room of the scene.

While Mulvey’s definition of the male gaze in “Visual Pleasure” is the earliest use of the term for this concept, it has actually been applied to more than film today. It can just as easily be applied to other media such as video games and television where it can be much more subtle than panning camera angles. It can be something as simple as choices of clothing, the way a female character speaks or moves, or where a still camera angle falls that centralizes sexualized areas of the body.

The male gaze beyond film

Ultimately, the male gaze is a theoretical concept that explores the nuanced ways our culture influences media and, in turn, the way media perpetuates troubling gender dynamics in our culture. It helps to be aware of the concept and to learn from it. In terms of professional writing, understanding the male gaze today offers professional writers an insight into the female perspective and teaches us to be conscientious of this segment of our audience so not to perpetuate the harmfulness of gender objectification.

Additional reading:

→ Laura Mulvey biography

→ Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”